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February 7, 2006
Transit Boards for All
Late last month we introduced the Transit Board™, a real-time arrival web tool for tracking TriMet buses and trains.
One TMA has already implemented it, we're in discussion with another TMA, an architecture office has put on their intranet.
One of the pieces of feedback we got is "let us define our own". So we've done just that. It's not quite as flexible, you can't change colors and fonts, and you can't pick individual lines, only sets of lines at a given stop, but you can setup your own Transit Board just be changing the url. Here's how it works:
http://tsrf.us/cgi-bin/tboard.pl?stop=8334&stop=8383
This particular board is designed for a hypothetical kiosk in the middle of Pioneer Courthouse Square, so it uses the MAX stops on either side of the square. You could add in as many stop=
You can get stop ids by looking on bus stops, or by using TriMet's Transit Tracker and noting the URL of the tracking page, looking for the locationID parameter.
We'll eventually have a tool that will let you click your way through setup of these, but not quite yet - hey, we're only volunteers.
The URL above works great as standalone page, but you can also put it inside another web page with an IFRAME tag, like so:
<iframe src="http://tsrf.us/cgi-bin/tboard.pl?stop=8334&stop=8383" frameborder=0 width=600 height=950>Frame could not be displayed</iframe>
[TIP: Play with the height= attribute of the IFRAME to balance extra white space against scroll bars depending on how many rows show up.]
Which would yield this...
And remember, if you want custom colors, font, bus lines, etc.; let us know, we can customize a Transit Board for you. We also now have a custom version that will work in a pop-up window!
Posted by Chris Smith at 7:12 AM
Comments
February 11, 2006 2:14 PM
Jon Says:
Have you guys considered a small transit board/transit surfer window that can be displayed on the desktop displaying the latest arrivals? I'd love something like this that I could leave on the corner of my desktop updating itself automaticly.
Also I realize NextBus already displays the streetcar arrival times but is there any way to include the streetcar arrival times in the Transit Surfer or to do any mods to the streetcar transit times?
Awesome job on this project!!!
February 11, 2006 2:28 PM
Chris Smith Says:
Yes to both questions. We have a style that works in a popup window (maybe not quite as small as you want) and in fact as I read your comment, I'm working on the code for the Streetcar.
Streetcar is a little more challenging since we have to negotiate with Streetcar and their vendor (different system than TriMet) to get the data. Still trying to wrap up that negotiation.
February 11, 2006 2:29 PM
Chris Smith Says:
Oh yeah, meant to say that you'll be able to see an example of the popup style when we launch on the Lloyd TMA site in a little bit.
February 12, 2006 12:03 PM
jon Says:
great thanks
March 16, 2006 2:51 PM
Chris Cotrell Says:
This is awesome! This is exactly what I needed when I was living in Ladd's Addition and commuting to PSU by bus. I used to have two TriMet pages bookmarked, one for my 14 stop on Hawthorne and one for my 10 stop at Ladd circle, and I would check both pages to see where the next bus was. I always wished I could have it on one page. Now, I could!
There are lots of spots in the city where you're about the same distance walk from two possibly useful websites, and it's important to check which one has the soonest bus you can catch. This tool makes that very easy to do. Nice work!
